Physician writes: Several historical items belonging to my ancestor were sold to a collector last year. These were his personal items with his name scratched into them and include his personal documents. I didn't learn about this until recently. The items were obtained by the seller (a dealer of such items) after the owner (apparently for the last 60 years) died at a very old age so nobody knows how he got them (whether stolen or purchased). I contacted the dealer who states the guy he sold them to (a nonrelative) refuses to sell them and plans on giving them to his young children when he dies despite having no family ties to the items in question. What recourse do I have, if any, given the murky circumstances under which the old dead guy obtained the items, to return them to their rightful heirs?

An anonymous reader writes: At last week's TEDxReset event in Istanbul, Futurist Thomas Frey predicted over 2 billion jobs will disappear by 2030. He paints a pretty convincing argument in this overview of five industries – where the jobs will be going away and the jobs that will likely replace at least some of them – over the coming decades.

erikhy writes: Bill Gates writes: "I am writing to share my fourth annual letter about the exciting work our foundation and its partners are doing. Over the last 50 years, the percentage of the population living in poverty has fallen from 40 percent to 15 percent, or just about a billion people. That's proof that modest investments in the poorest make a huge difference. However, tough economic times are making it difficult for countries to choose between foreign aid spending and domestic priorities, and many people believe that money spent on aid is wasted. My annual letter this year is an argument for making the choice to keep on helping extremely poor people build self-sufficiency.

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter. Please let me know what you think. I'd also appreciate if you would forward this out through your own social networks. I'm convinced that when people hear stories of the lives they've helped to improve, they want to do more, not less. So the more people we bring into this conversation the better.

An anonymous reader writes: Very interesting move by AMD to come out and set up a Pepsi Challenge immitation.They let gamers play on two similiar unmarked rigs and let people vote which one gave a better gaming experience at a gaming event in Dallas this past weekend.

kkleiner writes: "Researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel and Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston have collaborated to create a robot that can swim through the intestines. The size of a large pill, the “microswimmer” is powered by the strong magnetic fields generated by an MRI machine. A tail measuring 20mm x 5mm made of copper and flexible polymer vibrates due to the magnets and propels the little microrobot through the gut."

mikejuk writes: 2012 is the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing and many events are planned during the course of the year to celebrate this fact. To mark the start of the year we have a song, yes a song!, that tells the story and a long list of happenings.

rick446 writes: "I took some time to benchmark the global write lock improvements in MongoDB 2.0. From TFA: "MongoDB, as some of you may know, has a process-wide write lock. This has caused some degree of ridicule from database purists when they discover such a primitive locking model. Now per-database and per-collection locking is on the roadmap for MongoDB, but it's not here yet. What was announced in MongoDB version 2.0 was locking-with-yield. I was curious about the performance impact of the write lock and the improvement of lock-with-yield, so I decided to do a little benchmark, MongoDB 1.8 versus MongoDB 2.0.""

phaedrus5001 writes: From the article: "The city of Ulan Bator will attempt to capture some of the cool winter temperatures in huge ice blocks that will slowly melt over the summer and cool down the city. The aim is to build artificial ice shields — or “naleds” — that occur naturally in far northern climates and can grow to be more than seven meters thick. They grow when river water pushes through cracks in the surface of the ice during the day and then freezes to add an extra layer of ice when night falls.

Engineering consortium EMI-ECOS will try to replicate this process by creating holes in the ice that is forming over the Tuul river. This will be repeated over and over again until the ice is much thicker than it would be if left alone."

wiredmikey writes: Taking another page from Stuxnet, it seems the attackers behind Duqu used a Microsoft Windows zero-day as part of their attack campaign.

Researchers at the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS) — the group that initially discovered the original Duqu binaries — has located an installer for the malware. The installer file is a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploits a previously-unknown kernel vulnerability that allows code execution.

Once the Word file is opened, the malware executes and installs the Duqu binaries.

Mightee writes: "The Stockholm District Court sentence against Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was finalized today after he failed to appear at the Court of Appeal. Svartholm, also known as Anakata online, did not appear at the appeal trial last year because he was hospitalized in Cambodia and later went missing. The Court of Appeal has now decided to finalize the initial verdict of one year jail time and a fine of $1.1 million."

Layzej writes: Research from the Met Office has shed new light on a link between decadal solar variability and winter climate in the UK, northern Europe and parts of America. In years of low UV activity unusually cold air forms over the tropics in the stratosphere, about 50km up. This is balanced by more easterly flow of air over the mid latitudes — a pattern which then 'burrows' its way down to the surface, bringing easterly winds and cold winters to northern Europe. When solar UV output is higher than usual, the opposite occurs and there are strong westerlies which bring warm air and hence milder winters to Europe.

Sarah Ineson, who performed the experiments, said: "What we're seeing is UV levels affecting the distribution of air masses around the Atlantic basin. This causes a redistribution of heat — so while Europe and the US may be cooler, Canada and the Mediterranean will be warmer, and there is little direct impact on global temperatures."